— George Lucas Picks Chicago: After months of speculation and city rivalry, George Lucas has at last decided on Chicago as the future home of his Cultural Arts Museum. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been courting Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson (a Chicago native), for some time and has promised a 17-acre site near Soldier Field for the museum. “I can’t thank George and Mellody enough for choosing Chicago,” Emanuel said. “This will be a tremendous opportunity, a significant step for the city. No other major American city has these types of cultural and educational institutions, with a great Northerly Island creating a vibrant, green museum campus unparalleled in the United States.” [NBC Chicago]
— LACMA Expansion Avoids La Brea Tar Pits: Architect Peter Zumthor has altered his existing designs forLACMA’s proposed exhibition hall. The new renderings, released by the museum Tuesday, show the building stretching across Wilshire Boulevard in order to avoid the La Brea Tar Pits — unlike the old plan, which had concerned critics and raised environmental issues for its proximity to the historic site. LACMA director Michael Govan said the building’s planned 400,000-square-foot campus will remain the same and the new design “doesn’t change our basic vision and has the added benefit of lightening the mass in the park.” [NYT]
— Queen’s Royal Collection to Be Surveyed: Britain’s Royal Collection, which totals 7,564 oil paintings, will undergo the most ambitious condition survey ever attempted on a major group of paintings this summer. Each work in the Queen’s collection will be condition-checked, photographed, and cleaned, and many of the new digital images will be published online. The collection includes works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. [TAN]
— Conservation at the 9/11 Museum: The Wall Street Journal takes a look at what conservation means at an institution like the 9/11 Museum. “Most museums bring in conservators to fix things,” said Alice Greenwald, director of the museum. “Our conservators had the extraordinary obligation of figuring out how to present artifacts that were destroyed, falling apart, dented and mangled. They had to maintain the integrity of the destruction.” In other 9/11 Museum news, the institution has already had 300,000 visitors since it opened a month ago. [WSJ, AP]
— Koons Nostalgia: Koons koverage might have reached a kritical mass, but this republished Roberta Smith review from a 1988 Koons show gives some refreshing perspective on the artist’s career. [AiA]
— Seattle Spends on Public Art: Seattle plans to install $5 to 7 million worth of public art as part of its downtown waterfront redevelopment project. [AP]
— Thomas Ganter is the winner of the BP Portrait Prize for his painting of a homeless German man named Karel. [Guardian]
— Katia Meir was named director general of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal. [Art Daily]
— The Rubin Museum of Art has appointed Noah P. Dorsky and William E. Mayer to its board of trustees. [press release]
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